Hey HN, we're excited to introduce Sorbay - an open source alternative to Loom for creating and sharing screen recordings.
With Sorbay, you can easily record your screen, camera, and microphone all at once. It is a complete solution that comes with its own backend service, allowing you to instantly share a link of your recording as soon as it is finished. The video is streamed directly to the backend service as the recording happens to make this possible.
With both founders based in different countries, we needed a tool to quickly share screen recordings to keep us up to date or to ask for feedback. Meetings are cool if you need to discuss something deeply, but for almost everything else a quick recording works better.
We had to settle for one of the proprietary solutions because none of the open source tools allowed us to quickly share something with each other. Doing the recording is one aspect, but having the ability to instantly share a link was crucial. Waiting on a 400mb video upload to a Dropbox is just too much interruption if you want to quickly share something.
The tipping point for us to actually build this open source tool came via an interaction from one of our day jobs. A third party provider sent a screen recording full of confidential information and to make things worse, all of it was uploaded by them to a different third party service. We strongly believe that information like this should stay within a company, ideally on infrastructure that they control themselves. Having a fully integrated open source solution is the best way to go for this.
Our goal with this first public release is to gather feedback. The critical code paths are working, but it is still a bit rough to use. We deliberately
cut out all non-essential features, but have a clear roadmap on what we want to release this year.
There are a couple of known issues like audio glitches, non-working videos in Safari and crashing binaries that we hope to fix in the coming weeks. Later this
year, we plan on releasing a cloud hosted version of Sorbay that would let you connect your own S3 storage provider. Additionally, we will be releasing an on-prem option focused on features for enterprises (SSO, RBAC, compliance).
Both the Sorbay Client and the backend service are completely open source. For licensing we choose the AGPLv3 throughout the stack. The client is built
with Vue.js on top of Electron. The use of Electron might be a bit controversial here on Hackernews but given the resources we currently have that was
the only way that allowed us to get a working client out on all major platforms. The backend service is realized with Django. We use Keycloak for
authentication and Minio for S3 compatible storage. All of this is run alongside Postgres and Redis, running on Docker containers which are managed by Docker Compose.
We invite you to try Sorbay for yourself and join us on our issue tracker[1][2], Slack channel[3] or here on HN.
Thanks for checking out Sorbay!
[1]: https://github.com/sorbayhq/sorbay
[2]: https://github.com/sorbayhq/sorbay-client
[3]: https://join.slack.com/t/slack-oso6527/shared_invite/zt-1qd8...
I used to be a Loom user but actually churned because the screen recording in Slack is so good. You can download it without posting so I use it if I need to email a video.
Of course, it lacks the killer feature of link sharing.
Congratulations on launching and best of luck!